Self-hosting my photos with Immich • Hacker News Board

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#191

Post by cassiogo » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 12:29 PM UTC

renegade-otter wrote: post #181

Immich is a Google Photos clone, and when they say "self-hosting", they mean SELF-HOSTING. You need to be a web dev or a sys admin to be able to wrangle that thing. Nightmare upgrades, tons of weird bugs related to syncing. If your solution to an issue is "just reset the Redis cache", this is when I am done. Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to share photos - I don't want to host a Google Pho…

Such a weird take. Of course "self hosting" means "self hosting".

Sure it could be easier/safer to manage, everything can be better.

Over the last couple of years hosting it I had a single issue with an upgrade but that was because I simply ignore the upgrade instructions and YOLOed the docker compose update.

Again, is it perfect? No. Would I expect a non tech savy user to manage their own instance? Again no.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#192

Post by vishnukvmd » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 12:31 PM UTC

sylens wrote: post #186

denysvitali wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately Immich doesn't (yet) support object storage natively, which IMHO would make things way easier in a lot of ways. You can still mount an object storage bucket to the filesystem, but it's not supported officially by Immich and you anyways have additional delay caused by the fact that your device reaches out to your server, and your server reaches out to the bucket. It would be amazing (and I've been workin…

I think Ente uses MinIO for storage, I could see them supporting the ability to self-host in S3 at some point

Hey, you can connect any S3 compliant service to Ente.

Our quickstart.sh[1] bundles Minio, but you can configure Ente to use RustFS[2] or Garage[3] instead.

[1]: https://ente.io/help/self-hosting/#quickstart

[2]: https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs

[3]: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#193

Post by sylens » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 12:34 PM UTC

I’ve experimented with both Immich and Ente over the last year and run Immich in parallel with Google Photos right now for my family. Once they add a few more features to support things like smart albums, I’ll be able to drop Google Photos entirely.

I love that the consumer space is getting this kind of attention. It’s one of the biggest opportunities for big tech to lock people into their ecosystem, as photos are something everyone cherishes. You can extort people with ever increasing subscription fees because over time they reach a scale with their own photos that makes it inconvenient to manage themselves. It’s nice to have multiple options that are not Google or Apple.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#194

Post by palata » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 12:37 PM UTC

renegade-otter wrote: post #181

Immich is a Google Photos clone, and when they say "self-hosting", they mean SELF-HOSTING. You need to be a web dev or a sys admin to be able to wrangle that thing. Nightmare upgrades, tons of weird bugs related to syncing. If your solution to an issue is "just reset the Redis cache", this is when I am done. Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to share photos - I don't want to host a Google Pho…

Because it doesn't solve your problem does not mean it solves the wrong problem.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#195

Post by maccard » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 12:41 PM UTC

lilyball wrote: post #169

Dedime wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem with NixOS is the second you try to go "outside the guardrails", the difficulty increases 100x

Is it? Why? If a NixOS module doesn’t support what you need, you can just write your own module, and the module system lets you disable existing modules if you need to. Doing anything custom this way still feels easier than doing it in an imperative world.

> you can just write your own module, and the module system lets you disable existing modules if you need to

That sounds about 100x more difficult to me

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#196

Post by maccard » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 12:42 PM UTC

Ambroisie wrote: post #130

cromka wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. No. You can easily checkout repo containing the Dockerfile, add a Dockerfile override, change most of the stuff while maintaining the original Dockerfile instact and the ability to use git to update it. Then you change one line in docker-compose.yaml (or override it if it's also hosted by the repo) and build the container locally. Can't imagine easier way to modify existing docker images, I do this a lot…

I'll be honest, that does not sound "easy". It is straightforward, but so is the NixOS module system, and I could describe writing a custom module the same way you described custom Docker images.

If that’s not easy I don’t know what is.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#197

Post by tgiba » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 12:42 PM UTC

I use my Immich instance locally as photos and videos storage for 7-8 months now. It's really amazing. Reading comments here I'd say it's medium-difficulty tier to set up. I have it on my Elitedesk 800 G3 mini, in Docker Compose, with hardware encoding and it's more than sufficient to handle this work. Never had a bug.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#198

Post by em-bee » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 12:45 PM UTC

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #183

renegade-otter wrote: post #181

Immich is a Google Photos clone, and when they say "self-hosting", they mean SELF-HOSTING. You need to be a web dev or a sys admin to be able to wrangle that thing. Nightmare upgrades, tons of weird bugs related to syncing. If your solution to an issue is "just reset the Redis cache", this is when I am done. Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to share photos - I don't want to host a Google Pho…

I was just telling a nonprofit the other day, who in the name of “self hosting” was running their business on a 73 plugin WordPress site: Move to Shopify and LearnWorlds. Integrate the two. Stop self hosting. (They’re not large enough to do it well; and it already caused them a two week outage.)

disagree. as the sister comment mentions, wordpress may have been the wrong choice, but self hosting is never wrong, especially for a non profit who may not have the resources to deal with a situation if a hosting service decides to shut them out.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#199

Post by wobfan » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 12:46 PM UTC

tgiba wrote: post #197

I use my Immich instance locally as photos and videos storage for 7-8 months now. It's really amazing. Reading comments here I'd say it's medium-difficulty tier to set up. I have it on my Elitedesk 800 G3 mini, in Docker Compose, with hardware encoding and it's more than sufficient to handle this work. Never had a bug.

I fail to get the problems with self hosting Immich. I mean, obviously you gotta have a server ready, and at least some knowledge about self hosting and docker. But apart from that, installing Immich was like a breeze. It was actually not more than pasting some lines into a docker-compose, and running it.

Have been using it for about 1.5 years, and I have not a single problem, which is quite incredible for a software that basically has all features that Google Photos has.

Re: Self-hosting my photos with Immich

#200

Post by zenmac » Sat, Dec 06, 2025, 12:47 PM UTC

ptero wrote: post #190

renegade-otter wrote: post #181

Immich is a Google Photos clone, and when they say "self-hosting", they mean SELF-HOSTING. You need to be a web dev or a sys admin to be able to wrangle that thing. Nightmare upgrades, tons of weird bugs related to syncing. If your solution to an issue is "just reset the Redis cache", this is when I am done. Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to share photos - I don't want to host a Google Pho…

> Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to share photos That is a totally reasonable view. But others have different preferences. I, for example, do not want to share all my photos with Google, govvies and anyone else they leak them to. So I self host, back up and share my files with the family. I can always dump what I want to insta, etc. but it is my choice what to share, picture by picture, wi…

>> Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to share photos

pixelfed may be what the parent want then. I don't like that it is PHP, but as long as they adhere to the ActPub protocal, we can roll our own in whatever flavor.